High contrast situations be extremely challenging for the landscape photographer. Expose for the highlights or the sky and you can lose shadow details. Expose for the shadow details and you can burn out highlights or wash out the sky.

You can brand your images with an embossed, see-thru effect that displays the entire image while rendering it useless to anyone else for reproduction. There are just a few simple steps, perfect for automating with a Photoshop action. This tutorial explains how to prepare your proofs for the Web.

Digital photographers tend to worry obsessively about resolution and sharpness. Well, except when it comes to portraits. Photographic subjects prefer a more selective solution with nice sharp details for jewelry, hair, eyes, etc. But when it comes to skin, mny people prefer fewer details. They don;t want a plastic or waxy appearance, but they'd just as soon not see every skin pore or blemish. Mark Galer, the author of Photoshop CS4: Essential Skills offers some professional skin retouching tips.

I read an occasional comment in forums like Photography-on-the.net, DPReview.com, or RetouchPro where someone says they like the TLR sharpening tools but sometimes the effect is too strong or not strong enough.

TLR Color Overlay applies colored overlays to your images for interesting artistic effects. Your image can be in RGB, CMYK, or L*a*b mode. The actions use Fill Color adjustment layers to reduce RAM consumption and file size. It is intended to be part of a future TLR Professional Photographic Effects Toolkit.

A quick and easy way to convert an image from color to B&W is to use the Channel Mixer dialog. You can blend information from the individual RGB channels into a B&W image.

Overcast weather can provide a photographer with very even lighting. If you shoot images of flowers or do macro work, you'll likely find overcast light to be some of the best outdoor lighting. For the landscape photographer, however, an overcast day can be very disappointing. You can end up with a dull, flat image.

The source for this tip is a recent thread on Phil Askey's site, Digital Photography Review. Someone asked about using sharpening to enhance image contrast.

(If you have not visited "DPR," I encourage you to stop by. Phil offers very thorough reviews of new digital cameras. His forums are definitely among my personal favorites, too.)

A common thread on the Web asks for people to share their digital darkroom process. I'll give visitors to this site a quick walk-thru.

The image below is typical. Exposure is pretty good. White balance needs help. But this is a RAW image, so adjusting the white balance does not degrade the image. Contrast is a little flat. Goosing the saturation would add some more "pop" to the image. The water is not exactly level. Etc.

Getting the right Depth Of Field (DOF) for an image can be a challenge. Often, you want to get the subject in sharp focus and still blur details in the background and/or the foreground so they do not compete for attention. The Lens Blur filter is a new feature in Photoshop CS, and it is not all that well understood. Forget about the Gaussian Blur filter and read the tutorial to learn all about this powerful new tool for narrowing DOF in your images.